BIO

Alex is grateful to be back in Chicago after a year in La Crosse, Wisconsin, although she misses hiking the bluffs along the Mississippi. Originally from California, Alex moved to New York to pursue a directing career where she spent five years as Co-Artistic Director of Poetic Theater Productions and several years facilitating theater programs for military veterans before moving to Chicago to pursue her MFA. Recently, her desire to create a community-oriented practice has felt hamstrung by the strict hierarchies that underpin the theater industry. Alex is a creator and collaborator drawn toward installation, performance art, and hybrid performance models as better vehicles for radical community-building. She wants to use performance to imagine and implement restorative and transformative ways of being.

WHAT I MAKE

Experiments with intersectional feminist ideas and methods of theatrical process and performance. Radical communities and spaces of healing. Long term collaborative performance projects that can occur simultaneously in extremely localized settings and in virtual spaces that cross international boundaries, languages, and other access barriers.

INSPIRED BY

Artists who defy theatrical and formal expectations, such as Rimini Protokoll (Chinchilla Arschloch waswas), Derek DelGaudio & Frank Oz (In & Of Itself), Miranda July, and Hannah Gadsby. Afrofuturism and Speculative Fiction: in particular N.K. Jemisin (The City We Became).

EXPLORING:

Creativity has been showing up in how I hold space for community. I am looking to launch my company, The Metal Shop Performance Lab, as a creative experimental space for imagining radical communities in the coming months. I want to give it definition and structure, and grow a community of artists whose projects align with this mission. I want to give life to one artistic experiment of my own within this space and time.